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135-661: Although the various notations appear to be very different, they correspond with each other on most points. By the 1970s, it was generally agreed that Old Chinese had fewer points of articulation than Middle Chinese , a set of voiceless sonorants , and labiovelar and labio-laryngeal initials. Since the 1990s, most authors have agreed on a six-vowel system and a re-organized system of liquids . Earlier systems proposed voiced final stops to account for contacts between stop-final syllables and other tones, but many investigators now believe that Old Chinese lacked tonal distinctions, with Middle Chinese tones derived from consonant clusters at

270-672: A minor syllable followed by a full syllable, as in modern Khmer , but still written with a single character. The development of characters to signify the words of the language follows the same three stages that characterized Egyptian hieroglyphs , Mesopotamian cuneiform script and the Maya script . Some words could be represented by pictures (later stylized) such as 日 rì 'sun', 人 rén 'person' and 木 mù 'tree, wood', by abstract symbols such as 三 sān 'three' and 上 shàng 'up', or by composite symbols such as 林 lín 'forest' (two trees). About 1,000 of

405-515: A narrow transcription of the sounds of the standard language of the Tang dynasty . Beginning with his Analytical Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese (1923), he compared these sounds across groups of words written with Chinese characters with the same phonetic component . Noting that such words were not always pronounced identically in Middle Chinese, he postulated that their initials had

540-594: A subject (a noun phrase, sometimes understood) followed by a predicate , which could be of either nominal or verbal type. Before the Classical period, nominal predicates consisted of a copular particle *wjij 惟 followed by a noun phrase: 予 *ljaʔ I 惟 *wjij BE 小 *sjewʔ small 子 *tsjəʔ child 予 惟 小 子 Oracle bone Oracle bones are pieces of ox scapula and turtle plastron which were used in pyromancy  – a form of divination  – during

675-487: A "borrowed" character for a similar-sounding word ( rebus principle ). Later on, to reduce ambiguity, new characters were created for these phonetic borrowings by appending a radical that conveys a broad semantic category, resulting in compound xingsheng ( phono-semantic ) characters ( 形聲字 ). For the earliest attested stage of Old Chinese of the late Shang dynasty, the phonetic information implicit in these xingsheng characters which are grouped into phonetic series, known as

810-430: A character for a similarly sounding word with a semantic indicator. Often characters sharing a phonetic element (forming a phonetic series) are still pronounced alike, as in the character 中 ( zhōng , 'middle'), which was adapted to write the words chōng ('pour', 沖) and zhōng ('loyal', 忠). In other cases the words in a phonetic series have very different sounds both in Middle Chinese and in modern varieties. Since

945-473: A common point of articulation in an earlier phase he called "Archaic Chinese", but which is now usually called Old Chinese . For example, he postulated velar consonants as initials in the series In rarer cases where different types of initials occurred in the same series, as in he postulated initial clusters *kl- and *gl-. Karlgren believed that the voiced initials of Middle Chinese were aspirated, and projected these back onto Old Chinese. He also proposed

1080-567: A consistent feature of Chinese poetry. While much old poetry still rhymes in modern varieties of Chinese, Chinese scholars have long noted exceptions. This was attributed to lax rhyming practice of early poets until the late- Ming dynasty scholar Chen Di argued that a former consistency had been obscured by sound change . This implied that the rhyming practice of ancient poets recorded information about their pronunciation. Scholars have studied various bodies of poetry to identify classes of rhyming words at different periods. The oldest such collection

1215-451: A full set of aspirated nasals, as well as Yakhontov's labio-velar and labio-laryngeal initials. Pulleyblank also accepted Yakhontov's expanded role for the medial *-l-, which he noted was cognate with Tibeto-Burman *-r-. To account for phonetic contacts between Middle Chinese l- and dental initials, he also proposed an aspirated lateral *lh-. Pulleyblank also distinguished two sets of dental series, one derived from Old Chinese dental stops and

1350-526: A human skeleton). The targets and purposes of divination changed over time. During the reign of Wu Ding , diviners were likely to ask the powers or ancestors about things like the weather, success in battle, or building settlements. Offerings were promised if they would help with earthly affairs. Crack-making on jiazi (day 1) Zheng divined "In praying for harvest to the sun, (we) will cleave ten dappled cows, and pledge one hundred dappled cows." ( Heji 10116; Y530.2) Keightley explains that this divination

1485-509: A language without tones, but having consonant clusters at the end of the syllable, which developed into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese. Most researchers trace the core vocabulary of Old Chinese to Sino-Tibetan , with much early borrowing from neighbouring languages. During the Zhou period, the originally monosyllabic vocabulary was augmented with polysyllabic words formed by compounding and reduplication , although monosyllabic vocabulary

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1620-614: A new series of labio-velar and labio-laryngeal initials, or from the breaking of a vowel *-o- to -wa- before dental codas. Yakhontov proposed a simpler seven-vowel system: However, these vowels had an uneven distribution, with *ä and *â almost in complementary distribution and *ü occurring only in open syllables and before *-k. His final consonants were the nasals *-m, *-n and *-ng, corresponding stops *-p, *-t and *-k, as well as *-r, which became -j or disappeared in Middle Chinese. The Canadian sinologist Edwin Pulleyblank published

1755-471: A particular ancestor was causing a king's toothache. The divination charges were often directed at ancestors, whom the ancient Chinese revered and worshiped, as well as natural powers and Dì ( 帝 ), the highest god in the Shang society. Anything of concern to the royal house of Shang served as possible topics for charges, from illness, birth and death, to weather, warfare, agriculture, tribute and so on. One of

1890-571: A range of purposes. As in the modern language, there were sentence-final particles marking imperatives and yes/no questions . Other sentence-final particles expressed a range of connotations, the most important being *ljaj 也 , expressing static factuality, and *ɦjəʔ 矣 , implying a change. Other particles included the subordination marker *tjə 之 and the nominalizing particles *tjaʔ 者 (agent) and *srjaʔ 所 (object). Conjunctions could join nouns or clauses. As with English and modern Chinese, Old Chinese sentences can be analysed as

2025-418: A reconstruction of the consonants of Old Chinese in two parts in 1962. In addition to new analyses of the traditional evidence, he also made substantial use of transcription evidence. Though not a full reconstruction, Pulleyblank's work has been very influential, and many of his proposals are now widely accepted. Pulleyblank adapted Dong Tonghe 's proposal of a voiceless counterpart to the initial *m, proposing

2160-482: A reconstruction that, with minor variations, is still in wide use in China. For the initials, Wang largely followed Karlgren, but in later revisions recast Karlgren's voiced stops as voiced fricatives and a palatal lateral, re-interpreting the aspirated voiced stops and affricates as merely voiced. Wang refined the rhyme classes, distinguishing the 脂 zhī and 微 wēi classes. In his reconstruction, each rhyme class

2295-518: A result, the syntax and vocabulary of Old Chinese was preserved in Literary Chinese ( wenyan ), the standard for formal writing in China and neighboring Sinosphere countries until the early 20th century. Each character of the script represented a single Old Chinese morpheme , originally identical to a word. Most scholars believe that these words were monosyllabic. William Baxter and Laurent Sagart propose that some words consisted of

2430-606: A rich literature written in ink on bamboo and wooden slips and (toward the end of the period) silk. Although these are perishable materials, a significant number of texts were transmitted as copies, and a few of these survived to the present day as the received classics. Works from this period, including the Analects , the Mencius and the Commentary of Zuo , have been admired as models of prose style by later generations. As

2565-538: A series of unaspirated voiced initials to account for other correspondences, but later workers have discarded these in favour of alternative explanations. Karlgren accepted the argument of the Qing philologist Qian Daxin that the Middle Chinese dental and retroflex stop series were not distinguished in Old Chinese, but otherwise proposed the same points of articulation in Old Chinese as in Middle Chinese. This led him to

2700-404: A significant period of development prior to the extant inscriptions. This may have involved writing on perishable materials, as suggested by the appearance on oracle bones of the character 冊 cè 'records'. The character is thought to depict bamboo or wooden strips tied together with leather thongs, a writing material known from later archaeological finds. Development and simplification of

2835-435: A statelet within the Shang sphere of influence. These notations were generally made on the back of the shell's bridge (called bridge notations), the lower carapace, or the xiphiplastron (tail edge). Some shells may have been from locally raised tortoises, however. Scapula notations were near the socket or a lower edge. Some of these notations were not carved after being written with a brush, proving (along with other evidence)

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2970-463: A stop, e.g. He suggested that the departing tone words in such pairs had ended with a final voiced stop ( *-d or *-ɡ ) in Old Chinese. To account for occasional contacts between Middle Chinese finals -j and -n , Karlgren proposed that -j in such pairs derived from Old Chinese *-r . He believed there was insufficient evidence to support definitive statements about Old Chinese tones. Wang Li made extensive studies of Shijing rhymes and produced

3105-525: A temple dedicated to the Duke of Zhou during the Tang dynasty , about 18 km (11 mi) west of Qijia. They mention the Duke of Zhou and other figures of the early Western Zhou. A handful of oracle bones have been found at other Western Zhou sites, including some from Beijing. After the founding of Zhou, the Shang practices of bronze casting, pyromancy, and writing continued. Oracle bones that were found in

3240-417: A valuable reference for students of Old Chinese, and characters are routinely identified by their GSR position. Karlgren's remained the most commonly used until it was superseded by the system of Li Fang-Kuei in the 1970s. In his Études sur la phonologie chinoise (1915–1926), Karlgren produced the first complete reconstruction of Middle Chinese (which he called "Ancient Chinese"). He presented his system as

3375-552: A voiced initial, though scholars are divided on which form is basic. In the earliest period, Chinese was spoken in the valley of the Yellow River , surrounded by neighbouring languages, some of whose relatives, particularly Austroasiatic and the Kra–Dai and Miao–Yao languages , are still spoken today. The earliest borrowings in both directions provide further evidence of Old Chinese sounds, though complicated by uncertainty about

3510-470: Is also thought to be related to their ease of use as large, flat surfaces that needed minimal preparation. There is also speculation that only female tortoise shells were used, as these are significantly less concave. Pits or hollows were then drilled or chiseled partway through the bone or shell in an orderly series. At least one such drill has been unearthed at Erligang, exactly matching the pits in size and shape. The shape of these pits evolved over time, and

3645-432: Is an important indicator for dating the oracle bones within various sub-periods in the Shang dynasty. The shape and depth also helped determine the nature of the crack that would appear. The number of pits per bone or shell varied widely. Divinations were typically carried out for the Shang kings in the presence of a diviner. Very few oracle bones were used in divination by other members of the royal family or nobles close to

3780-574: Is applied to them as well. The bones or shells were first sourced and then prepared for use. Their sourcing is significant because some of them (especially many of the shells) are believed to have been presented as tribute to the Shang, which provides valuable information about diplomatic relations of the time. We know this because notations were often made on them recording their provenance (e.g., tribute of how many shells from where and on what date). For example, one notation records that " Què ( 雀 ) sent 250 (tortoise shells)", identifying this as, perhaps,

3915-510: Is believed to be a Chinese innovation arising from earlier prefixes. Proto-Sino-Tibetan is reconstructed with a six-vowel system as in recent reconstructions of Old Chinese, with the Tibeto-Burman languages distinguished by the merger of the mid-central vowel *-ə- with *-a- . The other vowels are preserved by both, with some alternation between *-e- and *-i- , and between *-o- and *-u- . The earliest known written records of

4050-442: Is characterized by its main vowel and coda. To account for Middle Chinese divisions and open/closed distinctions, Wang reconstructed medials: Wang argued that Old Chinese distinguished long and short syllables, the former being higher in pitch, and that the four tones of Middle Chinese were derived from the combination of length and the distinction between open and stop-final syllables: In particular, he argued that length caused

4185-715: Is known as a "verification". A complete record of all the above elements is rare; most bones contain just the date, diviner and topic of divination, and many remained uninscribed after the divination. The uninscribed divination is thought to have been brush-written with ink or cinnabar on the oracle bones or accompanying documents, as a few of the oracle bones found still bear their brush-written divinations without carving, while some have been found partially carved. After use, shells and bones used ritually were buried in separate pits (some for shells only; others for scapulae only), in groups of up to hundreds or even thousands (one pit unearthed in 1936 contained over 17,000 pieces along with

Reconstructions of Old Chinese - Misplaced Pages Continue

4320-419: Is known in detail. Eastern Han commentaries on the classics contain many remarks on the pronunciations of particular words, which has yielded a great deal of information on the pronunciations and even dialectal variation of the period. By studying such glosses, the Qing philologist Qian Daxin discovered that the labio-dental and retroflex stop initials identified in the rhyme table tradition were not present in

4455-450: Is largely absent in later texts, and the *l- forms disappeared during the classical period. In the post-Han period, 我 (modern Mandarin wǒ ) came to be used as the general first-person pronoun. Second-person pronouns included *njaʔ 汝 , *njəjʔ 爾 , *njə 而 and *njak 若 . The forms 汝 and 爾 continued to be used interchangeably until their replacement by the northwestern variant 你 (modern Mandarin nǐ ) in

4590-410: Is much less developed than that of families such as Indo-European or Austronesian . Although Old Chinese is by far the earliest attested member of the family, its logographic script does not clearly indicate the pronunciation of words. Other difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of

4725-412: Is not always straightforward, as words were not marked for function, word classes overlapped, and words of one class could sometimes be used in roles normally reserved for a different class. The task is more difficult with written texts than it would have been for speakers of Old Chinese, because the derivational morphology is often hidden by the writing system. For example, the verb *sək 'to block' and

4860-477: Is not known how Wang and Liu actually came across these specimens, but Wang is credited with being the first to recognize their significance. During the Boxer Rebellion , Wang reluctantly accepted a defense command, and killed himself in 1900 when allied troops entered Beijing. His son later sold the bones to Liu, who published the first book of rubbings of the oracle bone inscriptions in 1903. As news of

4995-624: Is that Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family , together with Burmese , Tibetan and many other languages spoken in the Himalayas and the Southeast Asian Massif . The evidence consists of some hundreds of proposed cognate words, including such basic vocabulary as the following: Although the relationship was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted, reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan

5130-544: Is the Shijing , containing songs ranging from the 10th to 7th centuries BC. The systematic study of Old Chinese rhymes began in the 17th century, when Gu Yanwu divided the rhyming words of the Shijing into ten groups ( 韻部 yùnbù ). Gu's analysis was refined by Qing dynasty philologists, steadily increasing the number of rhyme groups. One of these scholars, Duan Yucai , stated the important principle that characters in

5265-476: Is the phonological system of the Qieyun , a rhyme dictionary published in 601, with many revisions and expansions over the following centuries. These dictionaries set out to codify the pronunciations of characters to be used when reading the classics . They indicated pronunciation using the fanqie method, dividing a syllable into an initial consonant and the rest, called the final. In his Qièyùn kǎo (1842),

5400-479: Is thus also known as the Ruins of Yin, or Yinxu . Oracle bone inscriptions were published as they were discovered, in fascicles . Subsequently, many collections of inscriptions were also published. The following are the main collections. Observing that the citation of these different works was becoming unwieldy, historians Hu Houxuan and Guo Moruo began an effort to comprehensively publish all bones discovered by

5535-430: Is uncertain as some may be different versions of the same character. Specialists have agreed on the form, meanings, and sound of a little more than a quarter of the characters, roughly 1,200 with certainty, but several hundred more remain under discussion; these known characters comprise much of the core vocabulary of modern Chinese. They provide important information on the late Shang period, and scholars have reconstructed

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5670-434: Is unique in being addressed to the sun, but typical in that 10 cattle are being offered, with 100 more to follow if the harvest is good. Later divinations were more likely to be perfunctory, optimistic, made by the king himself, addressed to his ancestors, on a regular cycle, and unlikely to ask the ancestors to do anything. Keightley suggests that this reflects a change in ideas about what the powers and ancestors could do, and

5805-485: The Shuowen Jiezi , a dictionary compiled in the 2nd century, 82% of the 9,353 characters are classified as phono-semantic compounds. In the light of the modern understanding of Old Chinese phonology, researchers now believe that most of the characters originally classified as semantic compounds also have a phonetic nature. These developments were already present in the oracle bone script, possibly implying

5940-549: The xiesheng series , represents the only direct source of phonological data for reconstructing the language. The corpus of xingsheng characters was greatly expanded in the following Zhou dynasty. In addition, the rhymes of the earliest recorded poems, primarily those of the Classic of Poetry , provide an extensive source of phonological information with respect to syllable finals for the Central Plains dialects during

6075-449: The -j- medial of Middle Chinese was an innovation not present in Old Chinese. He classified Middle Chinese finals without -j- as type A and those with the medial as type B, and suggested that they arose from Old Chinese short and long vowels respectively. André-Georges Haudricourt had demonstrated in 1954 that the tones of Vietnamese were derived from final consonants *-ʔ and *-s in an atonal ancestral language. He also suggested that

6210-512: The Han period and the subsequent Northern and Southern dynasties . Old Chinese verbs , like their modern counterparts, did not show tense or aspect; these could be indicated with adverbs or particles if required. Verbs could be transitive or intransitive . As in the modern language, adjectives were a special kind of intransitive verb, and a few transitive verbs could also function as modal auxiliaries or as prepositions . Adverbs described

6345-601: The Japanese invasion of China in 1937. The Chinese still acknowledge the pioneering contribution of Menzies as "the foremost western scholar of Yin-Shang culture and oracle bone inscriptions" . His former residence in Anyang was declared a "Protected Treasure" in 2004, and the James Mellon Menzies Memorial Museum for Oracle Bone Studies was established. By the time of the establishment of

6480-533: The Late Shang period ( c.  1250  – c.  1050 BCE ) in ancient China. Scapulimancy is the specific term if ox scapulae were used for the divination, plastromancy if turtle plastrons were used. A recent count estimated that there were about 13,000 bones with a total of a little over 130,000 inscriptions in collections in China and some fourteen other countries. Diviners would submit questions to deities regarding weather, crop planting,

6615-478: The Late Shang period. Bronze inscriptions became plentiful during the following Zhou dynasty . The latter part of the Zhou period saw a flowering of literature, including classical works such as the Analects , the Mencius , and the Zuo Zhuan . These works served as models for Literary Chinese (or Classical Chinese ), which remained the written standard until the early twentieth century, thus preserving

6750-426: The Shijing , *a rhymed with *ă and *â, *ɛ rhymed with *ĕ and *ŭ, *ŭ rhymed with *u, *ô rhymed with *ộ, and *o rhymed with *ǒ and *å. Karlgren projected the final consonants of Middle Chinese, semivowels /j/ and /w/ , nasals /m/ , /n/ and /ŋ/ , and stops /p/ , /t/ and /k/ back onto Old Chinese. He also noted many cases where words in the departing tone rhymed or shared a phonetic element with words ending in

6885-414: The Tang period. However, in some Min dialects the second-person pronoun is derived from 汝 . Case distinctions were particularly marked among third-person pronouns. There was no third-person subject pronoun, but *tjə 之 , originally a distal demonstrative , came to be used as a third-person object pronoun in the classical period. The possessive pronoun was originally *kjot 厥 , replaced in

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7020-511: The Warring States period , writing became more widespread, with further simplification and variation, particularly in the eastern states. The most conservative script prevailed in the western state of Qin , which would later impose its standard on the whole of China. Old Chinese phonology has been reconstructed using a unique method relying on textual sources. The starting point is the Qieyun dictionary (601 AD), which classifies

7155-608: The Western Zhou and Spring and Autumn periods . Similarly, the Chu Ci provides rhyme data for the dialect spoken in the Chu region during the Warring States period . These rhymes, together with clues from the phonetic components of xingsheng characters, allow most characters attested in Old Chinese to be assigned to one of 30 or 31 rhyme groups. For late Old Chinese of the Han period,

7290-477: The Zhou dynasty , but the questions and prognostications were increasingly written with brushes and cinnabar ink, which degraded over time. Oracle bones bear the earliest known significant corpus of ancient Chinese writing , using an early form of Chinese characters . The inscriptions contain around 5,000 different characters, many of which are still being used today, though the total number of discrete characters

7425-482: The 1970s have been dated to the Zhou dynasty, with some dating to the Spring and Autumn period ; very few, however, were inscribed. It is thought that other methods of divination supplanted pyromancy, such as numerological divination using milfoil (yarrow) in connection with the hexagrams of the I Ching , leading to the decline of inscribed oracle bones. However, evidence for the continued use of plastromancy exists for

7560-500: The 1980s usually propose six  vowels : Vowels could optionally be followed by the same codas as in Middle Chinese: a glide *-j or *-w , a nasal *-m , *-n or *-ŋ , or a stop *-p , *-t or *-k . Some scholars also allow for a labiovelar coda *-kʷ . Most scholars now believe that Old Chinese lacked the tones found in later stages of the language, but had optional post-codas *-ʔ and *-s , which developed into

7695-410: The 1990s. Baxter did not produce a dictionary of reconstructions, but the book contains a large number of examples, including all the words occurring in rhymes in the Shijing , and his methods are described in great detail. Schuessler (2007) contains reconstructions of the entire Old Chinese lexicon using a simplified version of Baxter's system. Baxter's treatment of the initials is largely similar to

7830-441: The 19th century, villagers in the area who were digging in the fields discovered a number of bones, and used them as dragon bones , following the traditional Chinese medicine practice of grinding up Pleistocene fossils into tonics or poultices . The turtle shell fragments were prescribed for malaria, while the other animal bones were used in powdered form to treat knife wounds. In 1899, an antiques dealer from Shandong who

7965-740: The Cantonese scholar Chen Li performed a systematic analysis of a later redaction of the Qieyun , identifying its initial and final categories, though not the sounds they represented. Scholars have attempted to determine the phonetic content of the various distinctions by comparing them with rhyme tables from the Song dynasty , pronunciations in modern varieties and loans in Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese (the Sinoxenic materials), but many details regarding

8100-532: The Chinese departing tone derived from earlier *-s, which acted as a derivational suffix in Old Chinese. Then the departing tone syllables that Karlgren had reconstructed with *-d and *-g could instead be reconstructed as *-ts and *-ks, with the stops subsequently being lost before the final *-s, which eventually became a tonal distinction. The absence of a corresponding labial final could be attributed to early assimilation of *-ps to *-ts . Pulleyblank strengthened

8235-530: The Chinese language were found at the Yinxu site near modern Anyang identified as the last capital of the Shang dynasty , and date from about 1250 BC. These are the oracle bones , short inscriptions carved on turtle plastrons and ox scapulae for divinatory purposes, as well as a few brief bronze inscriptions . The language written is undoubtedly an early form of Chinese, but is difficult to interpret due to

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8370-418: The Han period. Many students of Chinese have noted "word families", groups of words with related meanings and variant pronunciations, sometimes written using the same character. One common case is "derivation by tone change", in which words in the departing tone appear to be derived from words in other tones. Another alternation involves transitive verbs with an unvoiced initial and passive or stative verbs with

8505-732: The Institute of History and Philology by Fu Sinian at the Academia Sinica in 1928, the source of the oracle bones had been traced back to modern Xiaotun ( 小屯村 ) village at Anyang in Henan. Official archaeological excavations led by Li Ji , the father of Chinese archaeology, between 1928 and 1937 discovered 20,000 oracle bone pieces, which now form the bulk of the Academia Sinica's collection in Taiwan and constitute about 1/5 of

8640-573: The Middle Chinese rising and departing tones respectively. Little is known of the grammar of the language of the Oracular and pre-Classical periods, as the texts are often of a ritual or formulaic nature, and much of their vocabulary has not been deciphered. In contrast, the rich literature of the Warring States period has been extensively analysed. Having no inflection , Old Chinese was heavily reliant on word order, grammatical particles , and inherent word classes . Classifying Old Chinese words

8775-748: The Middle Chinese stage, because they contain distinctions that cannot be derived from the Qieyun system. For example, the following dental initials have been identified in reconstructed proto-Min : Other points of articulation show similar distinctions within stops and nasals. Proto-Min voicing is inferred from the development of Min tones, but the phonetic values of the initials are otherwise uncertain. The sounds indicated as * -t , * -d , etc. are known as "softened stops" due to their reflexes in Jianyang and nearby Min varieties in Fujian , where they appear as fricatives or approximants, or are missing entirely, while

8910-518: The Rénmín ( 人民 ) Park phase. Four inscribed bones have been found at Zhengzhou: three with numbers 310, 311, and 312 in the Hebu corpus, and one that has a single character ( ㄓ ), which also appears in late Shang inscriptions. HB 310, which contained two brief divinations, has been lost, but is recorded in a rubbing and two photographs. HB 311 and 312 each contain a pair of characters that are similar to

9045-701: The Shang and early Zhou but was already in the process of disappearing by the Classical period. Likewise, by the Classical period, most morphological derivations had become unproductive or vestigial, and grammatical relationships were primarily indicated using word order and grammatical particles . Middle Chinese and its southern neighbours Kra–Dai , Hmong–Mien and the Vietic branch of Austroasiatic have similar tone systems, syllable structure, grammatical features and lack of inflection, but these are believed to be areal features spread by diffusion rather than indicating common descent. The most widely accepted hypothesis

9180-721: The Shang culture sites. Ox scapulae and plastrons, both prepared for divination, were found at the Shang culture sites of Táixīcūn ( 台西村 ) in Hebei and Qiūwān ( 丘灣 ) in Jiangsu . One or more pitted scapulae were found at Lùsìcūn ( 鹿寺村 ) in Henan, while unpitted scapulae have been found at Erlitou in Henan, Cixian ( 磁縣 ) in Hebei, Níngchéng ( 寧城 ) in Liaoning, and Qijia ( 齊家 ) in Gansu . Plastrons do not become more numerous than scapulae until

9315-496: The Shang royal genealogy from the cycle of ancestral sacrifices recorded on oracle bones. When they were discovered at the end of the nineteenth century and deciphered in the early twentieth century, these records confirmed the existence of the Shang, whose historicity had been subject to scrutiny at the time by the Doubting Antiquity School . Oraculology is the discipline for the study of oracle bones and

9450-571: The Xia–Shang–Zhou project. Most scholars now agree that the Zhou conquest of the Shang took place close to 1046 or 1045 BCE, over a century later than the traditional date. Since divination was by heat or fire and most often on plastrons or scapulae, the terms pyromancy , plastromancy and scapulimancy are often used for this process. The oracle bones are mostly turtle plastrons , probably female and ox scapulae, although there are also examples of tortoise carapaces , ox rib bones,

9585-473: The Zhou area. Although their language changed over time, it was highly uniform across this range at each point in time, suggesting that it reflected the prestige form used by the Zhou elite. Even longer pre-Classical texts on a wide range of subjects have also been transmitted through the literary tradition. The oldest sections of the Book of Documents , the Classic of Poetry and the I Ching , also date from

9720-453: The Zhou ritual centre known as the Zhōuyuán. Some of these are believed to be contemporaneous with the reign of Di Xin , the last Shang king, and others to date from the early Western Zhou. The inscriptions are distinguished from those of Anyang in the way the bones and shells were prepared and used, the smallness of the characters, the presence of unique vocabulary, and the use of the phases of

9855-584: The area was the site of the last Shang dynasty capital. Decades of uncontrolled digs followed to fuel the antiques trade, and many of these pieces eventually entered collections in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Japan. The first Western collector was the American missionary Frank H. Chalfant (1862–1914). Chalfant also coined the term "oracle bone" in his 1906 book Early Chinese Writing , which

9990-608: The areas oracle bones were discovered and thus it is theorized they were presented to the region as tribute. Neolithic diviners in China had long been heating the bones of deer, sheep, pigs, and cattle for similar purposes; evidence for this in Liaoning has been found dating to the late fourth millennium BCE. However, over time, the use of ox bones increased, and use of tortoise shells does not appear until early Shang culture. The earliest tortoise shells found that had been prepared for divinatory use (i.e., with chiseled pits) date to

10125-478: The beginning of the subsequent Zhou dynasty . The earliest oracle bones (corresponding to the reigns of Wu Ding and Zu Geng) record dates using only the 60-day cycle of stems and branches , though sometimes the month was also given. Attempts to determine an absolute chronology focus on a number of lunar eclipses recorded in inscriptions by the Bīn group, who worked during the reign of Wu Ding, possibly extending into

10260-462: The borrowed character would be modified slightly to distinguish it from the original, as with 毋 wú 'don't', a borrowing of 母 mǔ 'mother'. Later, phonetic loans were systematically disambiguated by the addition of semantic indicators, usually to the less common word: Such phono-semantic compound characters were already used extensively on the oracle bones, and the vast majority of characters created since then have been of this type. In

10395-414: The classical period by *ɡjə 其 . In the post-Han period, 其 came to be used as the general third-person pronoun. It survives in some Wu dialects, but has been replaced by a variety of forms elsewhere. There were demonstrative and interrogative pronouns , but no indefinite pronouns with the meanings 'something' or 'nothing'. The distributive pronouns were formed with a *-k suffix: As in

10530-424: The combination *-rj- to explain the retroflex and palatal obstruents of Middle Chinese, as well as many of its vowel contrasts. *-r- is generally accepted. However, although the distinction denoted by *-j- is universally accepted, its realization as a palatal glide has been challenged on a number of grounds, and a variety of different realizations have been used in recent constructions. Reconstructions since

10665-418: The core issues. For example, the Old Chinese initial consonants recognized by Li Fang-Kuei and William Baxter are given below, with Baxter's (mostly tentative) additions given in parentheses: Various initial clusters have been proposed, especially clusters of *s- with other consonants, but this area remains unsettled. Bernhard Karlgren and many later scholars posited the medials *-r- , *-j- and

10800-403: The cracking. A number of cracks were typically made in one session, sometimes on more than one bone, and these were typically numbered. The diviner in charge of the ceremony read the cracks to learn the answer to the divination. How exactly the cracks were interpreted is not known. The topic of divination was raised multiple times, and often in different ways, such as in the negative, or by changing

10935-401: The date being divined about. One oracle bone might be used for one session or for many, and one session could be recorded on a number of bones. The divined answer was sometimes then marked either "auspicious" or "inauspicious", and the king occasionally added a "prognostication", his reading on the nature of the omen. On very rare occasions, the actual outcome was later added to the bone in what

11070-416: The derived noun *səks 'frontier' were both written with the same character 塞 . Personal pronouns exhibit a wide variety of forms in Old Chinese texts, possibly due to dialectal variation. There were two groups of first-person pronouns: In the oracle bone inscriptions, the *l- pronouns were used by the king to refer to himself, and the *ŋ- forms for the Shang people as a whole. This distinction

11205-404: The division-II vowels of Middle Chinese derived from the Old Chinese medial *-l- that Karlgren had proposed to account for phonetic series contacts with l- . Yakhontov also observed that the Middle Chinese semi-vowel -w- had a limited distribution, occurring either after velar or laryngeal initials or before finals -aj , -an or at . He suggested that -w- had two sources, deriving from either

11340-486: The earliest Shang stratum at Erligang (modern Zhengzhou ). By the end of the Erligang, the plastrons were numerous, and at Anyang, scapulae and plastrons were used in roughly equal numbers. Due to the use of these shells in addition to bones, early references to the oracle bone script often used the term "shell and bone script", but since tortoise shells are actually a bony material, the more concise term "oracle bones"

11475-460: The earliest oracle bone inscriptions to 1230 BCE. 26 oracle bones throughout Wu Ding's reign have been radiocarbon dated to 1254–1197 BCE (±10 years) with an estimated 80-90% probability of containing the true individual ages. Period V inscriptions often identify numbered ritual cycles, making it easier to estimate the reign lengths of the last two kings. The start of this period is dated 1100–1090 BCE by Keightley and 1101 BCE by

11610-403: The early 20th century Huang Kan observed that only 19 of them occurred with a wide range of finals, implying that the others were in some sense secondary developments. The logographic Chinese writing system does not use symbols for individual sounds as is done in an alphabetic system. However, the vast majority of characters are phono-semantic compounds , in which a word is written by combining

11745-496: The early Zhou period, and closely resemble the bronze inscriptions in vocabulary, syntax, and style. A greater proportion of this more varied vocabulary has been identified than for the oracular period. The four centuries preceding the unification of China in 221 BC (the later Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States period ) constitute the Chinese classical period in the strict sense. There are many bronze inscriptions from this period, but they are vastly outweighed by

11880-655: The end of the syllable. The major sources for the sounds of Old Chinese, covering most of the lexicon, are the sound system of Middle Chinese (7th century AD), the structure of Chinese characters , and the rhyming patterns of the Classic of Poetry ( Shijing ), dating from the early part of the 1st millennium BC. Several other kinds of evidence are less comprehensive, but provide valuable clues. These include Min dialects, early Chinese transcriptions of foreign names, early loans between Chinese and neighbouring languages, and families of Chinese words that appear to be related. Middle Chinese, or more precisely Early Middle Chinese,

12015-730: The extent to which the living could influence them. While the use of bones in divination has been practiced almost globally, divination involving fire or heat has generally been found only in Asia and the Asian-derived North American cultures. The use of heat to crack scapulae (pyro-scapulimancy) originated in ancient China, the earliest evidence of which extends back to the 4th millennium BCE with archaeological finds from Liaoning, though these were not inscribed. The scapulae of cattle, sheep, pigs, and deer used in pyromancy have been found at neolithic archeological sites, and

12150-446: The few words where Karlgren had *b, as well as a voiceless counterpart *f. Unlike the above ideas, these have not been adopted by later workers. Pulleyblank also proposed a number of initial consonant clusters, allowing any initial to be preceded by *s- and followed by *-l- (*-r- in later revisions), and grave initials and *n to be followed by *-δ- (*-l- in later revisions). On the basis of transcription evidence, Pulleyblank argued that

12285-561: The finals are still disputed. According to its preface, the Qieyun did not reflect a single contemporary dialect, but incorporated distinctions made in different parts of China at the time (a diasystem ). The fact that the Qieyun system contains more distinctions than any single contemporary form of speech means that it retains additional information about the history of the language. The large number of initials and finals are unevenly distributed, suggesting hypotheses about earlier forms of Chinese. For example, it includes 37 initials, but in

12420-707: The following inventory of initial consonants: Li also included the *-l- medial proposed by Pulleyblank, in most cases re-interpreting it as *-r-. In addition to the medial *-j- projected back from Middle Chinese, he also postulated the combination *-rj-. Assuming that rhyming syllables had the same main vowel, Li proposed a system of four vowels *i , *u , *ə and *a . He also included three diphthongs *iə , *ia and *ua to account for syllables that were placed in rhyme groups reconstructed with *ə or *a but were distinguished in Middle Chinese: Li followed Karlgren in proposing final consonants *-d and *-g, but

12555-426: The following series of initial consonants: To account for the broad variety of vowels in his reconstruction of Middle Chinese, Karlgren also proposed a complex inventory of Old Chinese vowels: He also had a secondary vowel *i, which occurred only in combination with other vowels. As with Middle Chinese, Karlgren viewed his reconstruction as a narrow transcription of the sounds of Old Chinese. Thus *e rhymed with *ĕ in

12690-442: The fortunes of members of the royal family, military endeavors, and similar topics. These questions were carved onto the bone or shell in oracle bone script using a sharp tool. Intense heat was then applied with a metal rod until the bone or shell cracked due to thermal expansion . The diviner would then interpret the pattern of cracks and write the prognostication upon the piece as well. Pyromancy with bones continued in China into

12825-548: The inscribed oracle bones were found at the Yinxu site in modern Anyang and date to the reigns of the last nine Shang kings. The diviners named on the bones have been assigned to five periods by Dong Zuobin : The kings were involved in divination in all periods, with divinations in later periods done personally by the king. The extant inscriptions are not evenly distributed across these periods, with 55% coming from period I and 31% from periods III and IV. A few oracle bones date to

12960-463: The king. By the latest periods, the Shang kings took over the role of diviner personally. During a divination session, the shell or bone was anointed with blood and, in an inscription section called the "preface", the date was recorded using the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches , along with the diviner's name. Next, the topic of divination (called the "charge") was posed, such as whether

13095-420: The late Shang script. HB 312 was found in an upper layer of the Erligang culture. The others were found accidentally in river management earthworks, and so lack archaeological context. Pei Mingxiang argued that they predated the Anyang site. Takashima, referring to character forms and syntax, argues that they were contemporaneous with the reign of Wu Ding. A turtle plastron bearing several short inscriptions

13230-466: The limited subject matter and high proportion of proper names. Only half of the 4,000 characters used have been identified with certainty. Little is known about the grammar of this language, but it seems much less reliant on grammatical particles than Classical Chinese. From early in the Western Zhou period, around 1000 BC, the most important recovered texts are bronze inscriptions, many of considerable length. These texts are found throughout

13365-457: The loss of the final stop in checked syllables, giving rise to the departing tone. Other instance of the departing tone arise from word that shifted from the level and rising categories. In a pair of papers published in 1960, the Russian linguist Sergei Yakhontov proposed two revisions to the structure of Old Chinese that are now widely accepted. He proposed that both the retroflex initials and

13500-474: The mid-1950s. The result, the Jiaguwen Heji (1978–1982) was edited by Houxuan and Guo Moruo and, with its supplement (1999) edited by Peng Bangjiong, is the most comprehensive catalogue of the oracle bone fragments. The 20 volumes contain reproductions of over 55,000 fragments. A separate work published in 1999 contains transcriptions of the inscriptions into standard characters. The vast majority of

13635-575: The modern Southern Min languages, the oldest layer of Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary , and a few early transliterations of foreign proper names, as well as names for non-native flora and fauna, also provide insights into language reconstruction. Although many of the finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differed from Middle Chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initial consonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and liquids . Most recent reconstructions also describe Old Chinese as

13770-431: The modern language, localizers (compass directions, 'above', 'inside' and the like) could be placed after nouns to indicate relative positions. They could also precede verbs to indicate the direction of the action. Nouns denoting times were another special class (time words); they usually preceded the subject to specify the time of an action. However the classifiers so characteristic of Modern Chinese only became common in

13905-484: The moon as a dating device. Four pieces (HB 1, 12, 13 and 15) have been particularly puzzling, because they refer to sacrifices in the temples of Shang ancestors, and also differ from the other bones in calligraphy and syntax. Scholars disagree on whether they were produced at Anyang or the Zhouyuan, and whether the diviners and scribes were Shang or Zhou. In 2003, around 600 inscribed bones were found at Zhougongmiao,

14040-428: The most common topics was whether performing rituals in a certain manner would be satisfactory. An intense heat source was then inserted in a pit until it cracked. Due to the shape of the pit, the front side of the bone cracked in a rough 卜 shape. The character 卜 ( bǔ or pǔ ; Old Chinese : *puk ; 'to divine') may be a pictogram of such a crack; the reading of the character may also be an onomatopoeia for

14175-702: The most commonly used until it was replaced by that of Baxter in the 1990s. Although Li did not produce a complete dictionary of Old Chinese, he presented his methods in sufficient detail that others could apply them to the data. Schuessler (1987) includes reconstructions of the Western Zhou lexicon using Li's system. Li included the labio-velars, labio-laryngeals and voiceless nasals proposed by Pulleyblank. As Middle Chinese g- occurs only in palatal environments, Li attempted to derive both g- and ɣ- from Old Chinese *g- (and similarly *gw- ), but had to assume irregular developments in some cases. Thus he arrived at

14310-510: The non-softened variants appear as stops. Evidence from early loans into Mienic languages suggests that the softened stops were prenasalized . Several early texts contain transcriptions of foreign names and terms using Chinese characters for their phonetic values. Of particular importance are the many Buddhist transcriptions of the Eastern Han period, because the native pronunciation of the source languages, such as Sanskrit and Pali ,

14445-586: The oracle bone characters, nearly a quarter of the total, are of this type, though 300 of them have not yet been deciphered. Though the pictographic origins of these characters are apparent, they have already undergone extensive simplification and conventionalization. Evolved forms of most of these characters are still in common use today. Next, words that could not be represented pictorially, such as abstract terms and grammatical particles, were signified by borrowing characters of pictorial origin representing similar-sounding words (the " rebus strategy"): Sometimes

14580-500: The oracle bone script. Shang-era oracle bones are thought to have been unearthed occasionally by local farmers since as early as the Sui and Tang dynasties, and perhaps starting as early as the Han dynasty . In Sui and Tang era Anyang , which was at one time the capital of the Shang dynasty, oracle bones were exhumed during burial ceremonies, though grave diggers did not realize what the bones were and generally reinterred them. During

14715-431: The oracle bones' discovery spread throughout China and among foreign collectors and scholars the market for the bones exploded, though many collectors sought to keep the location of the bones' source a secret. Although scholars tried to find their source, antique dealers falsely claimed that the bones came from Tangyin in Henan. In 1908, scholar Luo Zhenyu discovered the source of the bones near Anyang and realized that

14850-499: The other derived from dental fricatives *δ and *θ, cognate with Tibeto-Burman *l-. He considered recasting his Old Chinese *l and *δ as *r and *l to match the Tibeto-Burman cognates, but rejected the idea to avoid complicating his account of the evolution of Chinese. Later he re-visited this decision, recasting *δ, *θ, *l and *lh as *l, *hl, *r and *hr respectively. Pulleyblank also proposed an Old Chinese labial fricative *v for

14985-529: The possible medials were *-r-, *-j- and the combination *-rj-. However while Li had proposed *-rj- as conditioning palatalization of velars, Baxter followed Pulleyblank in proposing it as the source of division III chóngniǔ finals. Old Chinese Old Chinese , also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese , and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese . The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BC, in

15120-456: The practice appears to have become quite common by the end of the third millennium BCE. Scapulae were unearthed along with smaller numbers of pitless plastrons in the Nánguānwài ( 南關外 ) stage at Zhengzhou; scapulae as well as smaller numbers of plastrons with chiseled pits were also discovered in the lower and upper Erligang stages. Significant use of tortoise plastrons does not appear until

15255-421: The proposals of Pulleyblank and Li. He reconstructed the liquids *l, *hl, *r and *hr in the same contexts as Pulleyblank. Unlike Li, he distinguished Old Chinese *ɦ and *w from *g and *gʷ. Other additions were *z, with a limited distribution, and voiceless and voiced palatals *hj and *j, which he described as "especially tentative, being based largely on scanty graphic evidence". As in Pulleyblank and Li's systems,

15390-403: The reading pronunciation of each character found in texts to that time within a precise, but abstract, phonological system. Scholars have sought to assign phonetic values to these Middle Chinese categories by comparing them with modern varieties of Chinese , Sino-Xenic pronunciations and transcriptions. Next, the phonology of Old Chinese is reconstructed by comparing the Qieyun categories to

15525-711: The reconstruction of early forms of those languages. Many authors have produced their own reconstructions of Old Chinese. A few of the most influential are listed here. The first complete reconstruction of Old Chinese was produced by the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren in a dictionary of Middle and Old Chinese, the Grammata Serica (1940), revised in 1957 as the Grammata Serica Recensa (GSR). Although Karlgren's Old Chinese reconstructions have been superseded, his comprehensive dictionary remains

15660-481: The reign of Zu Geng. Assuming that the 60-day cycle continued uninterrupted into the securely dated period, scholars have sought to match the recorded dates with calculated dates of eclipses. There is general agreement on four of these, spanning dates from 1198 to 1180 BCE. A fifth is assigned by some scholars to 1201 BCE. From this data, the Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project , relying on

15795-574: The rhyming practice of the Classic of Poetry (early 1st millennium BC) and the shared phonetic components of Chinese characters, some of which are slightly older. More recent efforts have supplemented this method with evidence from Old Chinese derivational morphology , from Chinese varieties preserving distinctions not found in the Qieyun , such as Min and Waxiang , and from early transcriptions and loans. Although many details are still disputed, recent formulations are in substantial agreement on

15930-474: The same phonetic series would be in the same rhyme group, making it possible to assign almost all words to rhyme groups. A final revision by Wang Li in the 1930s produced the standard set of 31 rhyme groups. These were used in all reconstructions up to the 1980s, when Zhengzhang Shangfang , Sergei Starostin and William Baxter independently proposed a more radical splitting into more than 50 rhyme groups. The Min dialects are believed to have split off before

16065-435: The scapulae of sheep, boars, horses, and deer, and other various animal bones. The skulls of deer, oxen, and humans have also been found with inscriptions on them, although these are very rare and appear to have been inscribed for record keeping or practice rather than for actual divination; in one case, inscribed deer antlers were reported, but Keightley reports that they are fake. Interestingly, tortoises are not native to

16200-412: The scope of a statement or various temporal relationships. They included two families of negatives starting with *p- and *m- , such as *pjə 不 and *mja 無 . Modern northern varieties derive the usual negative from the first family, while southern varieties preserve the second. The language had no adverbs of degree until late in the Classical period. Particles were function words serving

16335-467: The script continued during the pre-Classical and Classical periods, with characters becoming less pictorial and more linear and regular, with rounded strokes being replaced by sharp angles. The language developed compound words, though almost all constituent morphemes could also be used as independent words. Hundreds of morphemes of two or more syllables also entered the language, and were written with one phono-semantic compound character per syllable. During

16470-735: The smaller languages are poorly described because they are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach, including several sensitive border zones. Initial consonants generally correspond regarding place and manner of articulation , but voicing and aspiration are much less regular, and prefixal elements vary widely between languages. Some researchers believe that both these phenomena reflect lost minor syllables . Proto-Tibeto-Burman as reconstructed by Benedict and Matisoff lacks an aspiration distinction on initial stops and affricates. Aspiration in Old Chinese often corresponds to pre-initial consonants in Tibetan and Lolo-Burmese , and

16605-535: The sounds are assumed to have been similar at the time the characters were chosen, such relationships give clues to the lost sounds. The first systematic study of the structure of Chinese characters was Xu Shen 's Shuowen Jiezi (100 AD). The Shuowen was mostly based on the small seal script standardized in the Qin dynasty . Earlier characters from oracle bones and Zhou bronze inscriptions often reveal relationships that were obscured in later forms. Rhyme has been

16740-637: The statement in the "Against Luxurious Ease" chapter of the Book of Documents that the reign of Wu Ding lasted 59 years, dated it from 1250 to 1192 BCE. American sinologist David Keightley argued that the "Against Luxurious Ease" chapter should not be treated as a historical text because it was composed much later, presents reign lengths as moral judgements, and gives other reign lengths that are contradicted by oracle bone evidence. Estimating an average reign length of 20 years based on dated Zhou reigns, Keightley proposed that Wu Ding's reign started around 1200  BCE or earlier. Ken-ichi Takashima dates

16875-675: The theory with several examples of syllables in the departing tone being used to transcribe foreign words ending in -s into Chinese. He further proposed that the Middle Chinese rising tone derived from *-ʔ, implying that Old Chinese lacked tones. Mei Tsu-lin later supported this theory with evidence from early transcriptions of Sanskrit words, and pointed out that rising tone words end in a glottal stop in some modern Chinese dialects, including Wenzhounese and some Min dialects. The Chinese linguist Li Fang-Kuei published an important new reconstruction in 1971, synthesizing proposals of Yakhontov and Pulleyblank with ideas of his own. His system remained

17010-447: The total discovered. The major archaeologically excavated pits of bones have been: When deciphered, the inscriptions on the oracle bones were revealed to be records of the divinations performed for or by the royal household. These, together with royal-sized tombs, proved beyond a doubt for the first time the existence of the Shang dynasty, which had recently been doubted, and the location of its last capital, Yin. Today, Xiaotun at Anyang

17145-465: The use of the writing brush in Shang times. Scapulae are assumed to have generally come from the Shang's own livestock, perhaps those used in ritual sacrifice, although there are records of cattle sent as tribute as well, including some recorded via marginal notations. The bones or shells were cleaned of meat and then prepared by sawing, scraping, smoothing, and even polishing to create flat surfaces. The predominance of scapulae, and later of plastrons,

17280-499: The vocabulary and grammar of late Old Chinese. Old Chinese was written with several early forms of Chinese characters , including oracle bone , bronze , and seal scripts . Throughout the Old Chinese period, there was a close correspondence between a character and a monosyllabic and monomorphemic word. Although the script is not alphabetic, the majority of characters were created based on phonetic considerations. At first, words that were difficult to represent visually were written using

17415-540: Was found at Daxinzhuang in Shandong on the floor of a semi-subterranean house dating from the Late Shang period. The style of characters is close to that used by particular diviner groups active at Anyang during the reign of Wu Ding, though it shows some variations. Nearly 300 inscribed oracle bones (HB 1–290) were found in 1977 in two pits dug into a building foundation at Qijia, Fufeng County , Shaanxi , part of

17550-567: Was searching for Chinese bronzes in the area acquired a number of oracle bones from locals, and later sold several to Wang Yirong , the chancellor of the Imperial Academy in Beijing. Wang was a knowledgeable collector of Chinese bronzes, and is believed to be the first person in modern times to recognize the oracle bones' markings as ancient Chinese writing similar to that on Zhou dynasty bronzes. A legendary tale relates that Wang

17685-457: Was sick with malaria, and his scholar friend Liu E was visiting him and helped examine his medicine. They discovered that, before being ground into powder, the bones bore strange glyphs which, having studied the ancient bronze inscriptions , they recognized as ancient writing. Xu Yahui states that, "[n]o one can know how many oracle bones, prior to 1899, were ground up by traditional Chinese pharmacies and disappeared into people's stomachs." It

17820-439: Was still predominant. Unlike Middle Chinese and the modern Chinese languages, Old Chinese had a significant amount of derivational morphology. Several affixes have been identified, including ones for the verbification of nouns, conversion between transitive and intransitive verbs, and formation of causative verbs. Like modern Chinese, it appears to be uninflected, though a pronoun case and number system seems to have existed during

17955-550: Was the first to come up with a method of dating them (in order to avoid being fooled by fakes). In 1917 he published the first scientific study of the bones, including 2,369 drawings and inscriptions and thousands of ink rubbings. Through the donation of local people and his own archaeological excavations, he acquired the largest private collection in the world, over 35,000 pieces. He insisted that his collection remain in China, though some were sent to Canada by colleagues who were worried that they would be either destroyed or stolen during

18090-405: Was then calqued into Chinese as jiǎgǔ 甲骨 in the 1930s. Only a small number of dealers and collectors knew the location of the source of the oracle bones until they were found by Canadian missionary James Mellon Menzies , the first person to scientifically excavate, study, and decipher them. He was the first to conclude that the bones were records of divination from the Shang dynasty, and

18225-558: Was unable to clearly separate them from open syllables, and extended them to all rhyme groups but one, for which he proposed a final *-r. He also proposed that labio-velar consonants could occur as final consonants. Thus in Li's system every syllable ended in one of the following consonants: Li marked the rising and departing tones with a suffix *-x or *-h, without specifying how they were realized. William H. Baxter 's monograph A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology displaced Li's reconstruction in

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